Banks, Money Laundering | featured news

HSBC, the British banking giant, will pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe by federal and state authorities in the United States, a law enforcement official said Monday.

Regulators, led by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are said to be close to taking action against JPMorgan Chase for insufficient safeguards.

US prosecutors are looking into whether British bank HSBC was involved in laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and moving cash for Saudi Arabian banks with ties to terrorists, The New York Times reported Saturday.

New York’s top banking regulator had charged the British bank with laundering $250 billion in tainted money for Iranian clients.

Standard Chartered is in talks with multiple law-enforcement officials, including New York's banking regulator, to resolve a probe into improper Iranian money transactions by the British bank, according to people familiar with the situation.

A "pervasively polluted" culture at HSBC Holdings Plc allowed the bank to act as financier to clients seeking to route shadowy funds from the world's most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran,the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate report issued on Monday.

Drug money has a way of sprawling. And some of it may have reached Bank of America.A federal probe into Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, claims that the group has been laundering money through accounts at BofA, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

HSBC Holdings PLC is under investigation by a Senate panel in a money-laundering inquiry, the latest step in a long-running U.S. effort to halt shadowy money flows through global banks, according to people familiar with the situation and a company securities filing.

One of the US's top fraud investigators is warning that America's policing of money laundering is wide open to abuse.

Italian authorities are investigating the Vatican Bank over possible violations of money laundering regulations, the Bank of Italy told CNN Tuesday.